Theatre review: Life of Galileo

Lizzie Clachan has turned the Young Vic into a planetarium for Joe Wright's production of Brecht's Life of Galileo, one of the most visually stunning and inventive shows on the London stage right now. The set is in the round, with a central pit where some of the audience sit on cushions, with the actors mingling around them. It gives the impression of a group of students in a relaxed setting, sitting around a charismatic teacher who's on a roll. The teacher is Galileo Galilei (Brendan Cowell,) the subject he's excited about the Copernican Heresy, which proposed that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and which astronomer Giordano Bruno had recently been burned at the stake for promoting. But Galileo teaches in Padua, which has a special exemption from the Inquisition's clutches and besides, having stolen credit for the invention of the telescope, he now has a tool that he can actually use to look at the stars and prove Copernicus right.

Theatre review: Fear and Misery of the Third Reich

Fringe stalwart Phil Willmott has followed the example of some of the West End directors in forming his own eponymous production company, although unlike them his is a not-for-profit venture. He opens a short residency of two very contrasting works at the Union with Bertolt Brecht's rarely-performed indictment of the rise of the Nazis, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich. There's ominous mentions of the regime's ambitions to invade other nations and spread their power and ideology, but the play's real focus is on Germany itself in the years before World War II actually broke out, and the oppressive atmosphere which sees people betray their neighbours before they can be betrayed themselves. A pair of Hitler Youth (Ben Kerfoot and Tom Williams) patrol as a number of loosely-connected sketches play out, opening with a factory worker (Joshua Ruhle) refusing to join in with the official propaganda, and being carted off to prison.